4 Ways Socium Ensured Cyber Week Was a Success

With digital marketing being an ever-changing industry, working with a reputable agency provides many benefits—such as access to industry expertise/knowledge and brand development, to name a few!

But like many other aspects of business, not every agency approaches client work similarly. Yet, every agency can agree with the importance of measuring the success of a significant holiday week, such as Cyber Week (Black Friday and Cyber Monday). But how they measure success is another story.

So, now that we’re (just barely!) on the other side of Cyber Week 2022, I wanted to share the best practices we follow here at Socium Media when evaluating our team and client success during this monumental shopping weekend.

As a performance digital agency, we segment everything into four sections to assess our efforts collectively and individually. The sections that work best for us are: goals, communication, reporting, and culture.

Goals

Most people view goals as binary, you either met them or didn’t. It’s in our DNA to zoom out and look at the entire picture when establishing our goals. For example, in addition to whether or not we achieved a CPA goal, we want to know if we hit our clients’ paid media and .com goals—or, more importantly, were they exceeded?  We view paid media and .com goals as two separate areas but acknowledge the relationship between the two. As an agency, we launch and manage direct response campaigns; however, the impact digital advertising has on our client’s total website demand is our top priority.

Additionally, we review our forecasts closely in preparation for future campaigns. It’s essential to know whether or not they were accurate and if they helped inform our team’s decisions, strategy, and optimizations for the better.

Communication

During a highly-competitive time such as Cyber Week, our client/agency communications are of the utmost importance. In alignment with our ‘overcommunicate’ principle, our team reviewed performance and communicated directly with our clients every morning and throughout the day. Communication ranged from Slack messages, to standing morning calls, in which we’d recap the previous day’s data and discuss our plan for the current day and on.

Additionally, we ran audit checklists daily. This information was then communicated to the client for awareness of the campaign’s status and any potential areas of opportunity or improvement.

Reporting

While engine data can provide valuable insights, we’ve found that it’s best utilized directionally. This is particularly important during major traffic days because of the risk of laggy results in the native platforms. Instead of reporting on engine data alone, we aggregate it with our clients’ Source of Truth data (such as Shopify or Google Analytics) for accurate performance data and make adjustments/optimizations in real time to hit our goals.

Typically, many agencies rely primarily on weekly reports. With a few of our larger clients where there was enough data, we utilize hourly performance reporting (in addition to several others, such as product reports, tactic reports, channel reports, etc.). By breaking performance down by the hour, we can be nimble and make real-time changes based on specific channel performance. Hourly performance reports also help identify trends for the day, so we know when and where to modify budget allocation.

Culture

A strong agency culture is vital, especially in highly stressful times such as Cyber Week. We’ve built an award-winning agency culture that maintains a healthy level of competitiveness while keeping our team engaged, motivated, and fulfilled. 

An example of how we encourage healthy competition amongst our team is our “Crystal Ball Bonanza” with one of our clients to predict overall .com demand. Each day, everyone on the account votes, and whoever is closest to the actual number wins a prize. While it may seem like a small gesture, it fosters healthy competition and encourages everybody to stay focused and aligned on our North Star.

Though prizes and rewards are fun, we also ensure that our team always has access to adequate resources and their workload is manageable. These efforts tie into our win/win principle: if our team is happy and well taken care of, that positive energy and momentum will feed into their client campaigns.

We hope our best practices have sparked new ideas on how you can measure your Cyber Week success! If your Cyber Week expectations and goals weren’t exceeded, we’d love to connect and learn how we can help. Our clients have seen record-breaking successes year after year as a result of these tried and true Socium best practices.